12K US Vinyl & CDs

Review: 12k is very happy to welcome Uwe Zahn, aka Arovane, to the roster. Arovane, a well-respected artist in the field, hailing from within the German countryside, has been active since the early 2000s beginning with releases on City Centre Offices and DIN in the heyday of the IDM and microsound years. He has since gone on to release work with n5MD, Pure Magnetik, and Strangely Isolated Place, among others. With Reihen he takes his characteristic pointillist synthetic structures and impeccable sound design and lays them in a web of fagility, decay and etherealism that feels like new a new direction for Zahn.

Review: German artist Uwe Zahn (Arovane) and 12k's Taylor Deupree join forces for the first time, having first become acquainted through a shared love of music tech. As Zahn recalls: "After a long email conversation, Taylor and I came up with the idea of recording an album only with sound sources from the Nonlinear Labs C15 synthesizer that we both own. The first sketches were made with an exchanging of C15 patches and a constantly growing shared sound pool that led to the structure of the first songs. Preferring to work in person, but hampered by the pandemic, we resorted to sending projects back and forth. and developed an organic method that inspired and excited us."
With a shared love of experimentation, the two partners took on different roles, Deupree offering the rough diamonds, organic loops and mixing skills, while Zahn took on the more fragile, miniscule sound design. Described as "deep and haunting", with massive worlds compacted into each sound and movement.

Review: You've always been able to hear the West Coast in Monocoastal, but it's particularly present when you shut your eyes after 12 months of lockdown stopping you from visiting the region. Less active L.A., and more observing in Oregon, Fischer's career didn't end with this in 2011 and the multi-disciplinary artist has produced great things since, but the album is certainly one of turning points in terms of reputation and note.

The idea of slowly watching time unfold in un-rushed places is also highly appropriate. Among the washes of tape and the waves of refrain that make up this beautiful, meditative outing, you'll hear takes and half-harmonies from found instruments including a piano and xylophone. Overall, it feels like a place removed from linearity. A liminal masterpiece, if you are that way inclined.

Review: Ezekiel Honig is a New York City-based artist who founded two vital labels, Anticipate Recordings and Microcosm, and now he is back with a new album on 12K. Unmapping The Distance Keeps Getting Closer is a tender and honest work of art that wears its heart on its sleeve with piano, horns and broken rhythms all characterising the palette. Field recordings are also worked into the arrangements to add a real narrative and to really evoke a sense of place. Add in plenty of textural and tactile motives and you have a journeying album full of melancholy but also a sense of hope.

Review: Giuseppe Ielasi is back following his 2020 release Five Wooden Frames. There he returned to the guitar exploring shifting and modulating loops and the interplay of tuning and drifting to create five stark yet ethereal pieces. On The Prospect, Ielasi sticks to solo guitar but this time in a much more pure form. Each of the two pieces consists of parallel electric guitar lines recorded simply through a tube amplifier free of studio tricks or heavy editing. Like much music written over the past few years The Prospect is reflective and personal. Created during a time of tragic family loss there is clear melancholy in the stark arrangements where spaces between notes become the sounds of searching. Ielasi's haunting guitar brings us along to a new phase in his life that is as unknown to us as it is to him.

Review: Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date are the Illuha duo but for this new Tobira album they link with percussionist Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. He is a skilled drummer who has worked alone on Black Truffle but has also collaborated with Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Keiji Haino, Phew and Oren Ambarchi among others. This new record focusses on electro-acoustic sounds that are run through with all manner of precise sonic details and are carried by Yamamoto's unique playing style and singular sense of groove which were recorded over two sessions. That playing style finds him playing very lightly with closely mic'ed drums so plenty of softness is captured and then interwoven with layers of Rhodes, piano, distant synths and metallic murmurations.

Review: Will Samson returns with a new album Harp Swells after more than ten years of crafting delicate sounds that are often led by his own tender voice. Now back on Taylor Deupree's experimental label, he fully immerses himself in the ambient world he previously considered only a side project. Thse record is a real meditation that sees him move away from the melancholy of his past and towards more bright and optimistic melodies. His aim is to heal himself through music and this record has six movements, each of which is based around his use of a 70s portable reel-to-reel tape recorder known as the UHER 4200. It makes for a widescreen and mesmeric work that stretches out in all directions around you with glistening melodies and slowly shifting energies that truly uplift.

Review: Japanese artist Sawako returns to 12K with her first new release on the label since 2008's Bitter Sweet (12k1047). Sawako's sound, fragile and amorphous, may be made up of digital elements but takes on a humble, human sound here. Here she collapses eight years of memories and recordings into layers of sound intended to "open the body to the celestial world". Using generative compositional methods she recorded fragments of melodies on days of full moons, new moons, planetary conjunctions and around other notable events happening in the skies. She references orbits, sound waves and light, with suitably dream like results.

Review: Deep Valley is a new collaborative work by Australian artists Seaworthy aka Cameron Webb and Matt Rosner and they came together for it during a week-long residency at Bundanon Art Museum in New South Wales. The property which was gifted to the Australian public by artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd in the 1990s offers a unique landscape along the Shoalhaven River and is surrounded by sandstone cliffs and diverse wildlife. Drawing inspiration from Boyd's belief that "you can't own a landscape," Deep Valley combines the inspiration of that setting with environmental recordings, guitars, piano, and electronic processing all of which aim to highlight the transient nature of ecosystems and encourage you to reconnect with the sounds of nature.